16 INNOCéNCé IN I WICt(éD WORLD B OMBAZINE is often spoken of by authors, usually in a sneering way, but the only person I ever knew to wear it was Aunt Sophie, an ancient colored woman who lived in the alley behind our house in Baltimore w hen I was a boy. As I recall it, it was a somewhat stiff and shiny fabric, apparen tly black at the start, but con- verted by the oxygen of the air into a sinister, malarious polychrome like that of the waters of a stagnant frog pond. Sophie wore it on all public occaSIons, along with a long crêpe veil of the same unappetizing color. As the widow of a military barber, J eems by name, who had cared for the whiskers of General George H. Thomas during the Civil \V ar, she was in receipt of a modest pension from the United States Treas- ury, and on it she lived at eaSe in her little four-room house, and even in a kind of opulence. Her days were very busy. \Vhenever there was a funeral in \Vest Baltimore, whether in a white street or a colored, she arrived in good time and planted herself on the sidewalk. She carried a white cambric handkerchief that, un- der the ravages of time, had taken on the texture of a lace curtain, and as the pallbearers emerged with the departed she always applied it politely to her eyes. If the cortege went to any church within walking distance, she hustled along beside it, and since the hack horses of those days were encouraged to move slowly, she usually beat them to the sacred edifice by at least a length, and grabbed a decorous seat near the door. There she mourned quietly in the character of an old friend, or eVen of a relative, if the departed happened to be colored, and In that of a family retainer if he or she were white. She was, in fact, more or less related to fully half the black folk in our neighborhood, for Inost of them had come from either Fauquier County, Virginia, where her ]eems was born, or Calvert County, Maryland, where she was born herself. And all the white folks knew and esteemed her. This funeral-going occupied a large part of her time, and it was seldon1 that she got through two days run- ning without putting on her uniform of woe. Among her own people her ab- sence from the forefront of mortuary orgies was always remarked, and often it had a moral significance. F or she was a woman of strict Christian prin- ciples, and permitted herself no com- promise with sin. Thus she took her station at least five or six doors away from the house of sorrow when Lily, our next-door neighbor's cook, was carried to rest, for Lily had lived in open adultery with Old Wesley, the black metaphysician of the vicinity, for sixteen shameful years. And when a yellow fellow in Vincent Alley ran amuck one night and slit his wife's weasand, and was duly hanged for it at the CIty jail, she refused primly to patronize the ensuing ceremonials, though they attracted all the other colored people for a mile around, and also all the white boys who could es- cape their mothers' vigilance. My bro- ther and I both sneaked into the tiny parlor to see the corpse, and were haunted for many nights afterward by the marks of the rope on its gaunt, felonious neck. Old Sophie was made welcome at funerals, for she was very well regard- ed throughout \Vest BaltÎ1nore. 'I'he only time she was ever turned away, to my knowledge, was when Joe Gans, the colored pugilist, was buried. ] oe was so eminent a character among his own people that his funeral had to be divided into three cantos and held suc- cessively in three different churches to accommodate the immense concourse. Even so, many more appeared than could get in to hear and see, and his heirs and assigns, at the last moment, made a rule that ol1ly those who arrived in carriages should be admitted. 'rhis barred out Aunt Sophie, for she had no carriage and was too thrifty a woman to blow in four dollars-the extortion- ate price for the day-un a public hack. \ '\ \ 1...,-. , : .. . . ,\ :i1! : . S ....'''''' '1 " . : .: I .;:", :.., .t, .:-::;;- ." ;>1.;'.., ,. , ...." ,,'...: -; '. :. . "w.: ,. . :: . . /: , . "" . . . . (''>:';z , ,... . . : .f r.:f :---t f , - ,';>:Y'.;: ;r ( .lI :.;;. ".:i\ \ .., .:;Ýi : 'í': ;J Æ r; 1A " I, ì-'": I ",. f.}: ) t. ''':. . <:: . " / "4' ;'.J ). . ì"" . ft"*- ..... \\ :, v .: ' .2. < (\ ..,tJ \, . . i , ;:. . I r -m:\\. . ' )) .jf ..\, . $:" ....dF' .,..... \ '"' " FEBRUARY 2.. 0, I 9 .3 7 \V orse, the baffled crowds outside the three churches were so large and turbu- lent, despite the bellowing and scuffling of the police, that she never gut within half a block of poor Joe's bones. Thus she appeared, unwittingly, to be operat- ing her familiar moral boycott on him, but as a matter of fact she admired hin1 vastly, and had proofs, as she said, that he had died in the bosom of the A.M.E. Church and confident of a glorious resurrection. T HE one curse of Aunt Sophie's otherwise peaceful and happy life was her fear of the murderous vil- lains she called "body-snatchers.': These "body-snatchers" were not grave-rob- bers, but criminals who engaged in the far worse business of manufacturing '-' cadavers for the trade. Sophie's fear of them actually had some ground in logic, for in the early eighties one Elnilr Brown, another respectable old Balti- more colored woman, had been mur- dered by two thugs, and her remains sold to the janitor of the University of Maryland Medical School for fif- teen dollars. The pursuit and trial of the assassins gave Baltimore, white and blaçk, a show that was remembered for years afterward. They had repre- sented to the janitor that they were un- dertakers trying to get rid of an insol- vent client, and so he was cleared of all guilt, but they themselves were hanged. 'I'he janitor was very careful after that, but most colored people believed that he still had murderers in his en1ploy, and only the bravest or craziest everventured to pass the Medical School after dark. Aunt Sophie held the view that his agents w'ere on the prowl, not only in the immediate vicinity of his grisly den but also all over \Vest Baltin1ore. Thus, when she had to be abroad by night she kept to well-lighted streets) and whenever it was 'possible induced someone else to go along. \Vhen she was alone her eye was alert for police- Inen, and after she had passed one she always looked back over her shoulder two or three times, to make sure that · he was still there, and ready to pro- tect her if necessary. Most of the cops knew her, and now and then one of them would have some fun by let- ting off a fearful whoop after she had gone by. In such cases it was hard for her to make up her mind whether she should rush back to him or gallop on. One dismal autumn night, on her way down Hollins Street to her A.M.E. tabernacle on Stockton Street, she was suddenly alarmed by the sound